"The movement of writing, for someone keeping a journal or writing a novel, article, or speech, is always the same. First you go down. Writers are always consumed with the need to connect. That can't be done until you have gone far enough into yourself to find your own deep feelings...
It's not that the reader has to agree, not even after reading the story. It's only that the reader must be persuaded enough to care."

---Donna Sinclair

Here is what I learned at the Bible Workbench in Boston yesterday: "the student is the curriculum"

Tags:

homeschooling

*Star Date* -- the day that I picked up my cello again with the intention of working back to the point where I stopped in January 2006. Played for about three-quarters of an hour, but I could not stop. I played not for perfection, but to get the feeling back into my fingers and for intonation from Suzuki Book Two. Long,Long Ago; May Time; Minuet No. 1,Bach; Minuet No.3,Bach; Chorus from 'Judas Maccabaeus,'Handel; Hunter's Chorus; Musette from English Suite No.3, Bach; March in G,Bach; (skipped The Two Grenadiers and Gavotte, Gossec); Bourree, Handel. Then, just for fun, the Berceuse by Schubert at the beginning of Book Three and the first page of the first Kummer Duet for two cellos from Opus 22.

Current Mood: elated

Tags:

cello

Hanging wash, hot sun,
the cicada's sizzling drone,
such soft memories.

Tomato Progress

Yes, this is a tomato about one inch in diameter. All the other blossoms seem not to have metamorphosed into fruit. Will we eat homegrown tomato this summer? Stay tuned...

Marjorum with Maple Seedlings

The ubiquitous Maples of New England

These Mother Bears are going on a mission trip with 25 nurses to Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic to bring love and comfort to children seeking medical care.

Tags:

mother bears

Laundry

Storm Coming

Views from the patio under the grape arbor

Buddha by the Water

Other: Rose Bush in Bloom and Progress of Tomato Plant

The Golden Corner with blooming Daisies and Yarrow

Peonies

PEONIES!

Tags:

june garden

Pictures laboriously retrieved from camera to computer, from computer to flickr and from flickr to dreamwidth.

Ocean and Sky

View from Cottage

The best ice cream on the coast

This took two hours, but I hope that it will go better next time.

In response: After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.

--- John Taylor Gatto

19600 stitches plus the four corners,800 = 20400. That makes me feel better. I like rounding up.

Correction: That is 980 stitches times 20 rows = 19600 stitches.

Steps 1 and 2 are completed! All 12 blocks have been knit and sewn together. All that remains is knitting the border.

Tags:

knitting

tomato plant 6/5/09

coral bells

blue flax

amsonia

southern border: kalimeris, liatris and salvia

western/golden corner

lavender

Tags:

garden

A dream came true last night. My daughter and I traveled to the Goodwin Library in the small town of Farmington, N.H. to see my favorite living mystery writer, Julia Spencer-Fleming. For those, who don't know her, she is the author of a series of six, and one on the way, mysteries featuring the Chief of Police and the female Episcopal priest of a small New York town on the edge of the Adirondack Mountains. Each book consists of a self-contained mystery, but there is an overall arc in the six books which follows the mystery of the relationship between these two characters.

Spencer-Fleming is a terrifically talented writer, who balances exciting mysteries, the in-depth study of characters and their relationships to one another and to God, and the exploration of social issues deftly and seamlessly arising from the characters and the plot. In addition, underlying all are the profound issues of life, death, sin, and salvation.

So important are these themes, and so excitingly presented, that four years ago I chose to lead a study group in the Episcopal Church where I worked as a director of religious education based on the first book, In the Bleak Midwinter. The seasons of the year and the liturgical seasons are of significance in this series. In the Bleak Midwinter takes place, as the title suggests, during the meteorological season of Winter and the Christian liturgical season of Advent, the preparatory period of waitingfor the birth of Jesus. Our study group met once a week during Advent and was full of lively discussion and debate. I heartily recommend this series for reading and for book groups, and particularly for church study groups.

Tags:

mystery novels

Here I am on the latest big thing, dreamwidth, but I have to confess thatI am much more excited about having opened an account on Ravelry, a knit and crochet community. There are over 300,000 members on Ravelry.

I need to learn how to post pictures so that I can catalog my knitting projects. In the meantime I have been busy searching for and joining groups---groups of friends who both craft and share something else in common.

So far I have joined eight: Crafty Gardeners (self-explanatory); La Leche League International (I was a leader for 14 years); AP Knitters (attachment parenting); Mother Bear Project (knitting teddy bears for children orphaned or otherwise affected by AIDS in third world countries); Yarn Harlot fans (an author who writes about knitting and life and stuff); and two religious groups---Via Media (Episcopalian knitters); and OrthoCrafters ( Eastern Orthodox knitters, mostly converts, it seems); and Vermont Knitters, a piece of nostalgia for my childhood home. I am mostly going to be reading for now, but I am very excited where I seem to belong.

The empty tomb

John 20

That woman was the first word spoken

must have taken even the angels by surprise,

who were used to bringing their fiery glory

down to the clanging swords of battlefields,

to priests tugging at their beards

in lamentation, to voices thundering in temples

and muscles hefting stones from mountaintops,

not to a trembling woman whose hair clung

to her neck with tears, who for a moment

held the souls of the nations like a basket of figs.

Tania Runyan

This poem brings home to me how utterly radical the good news was and is. When I was ten years old, I wrote a school essay that for some reason made the point that Jesus was one of the first male religious leaders to treat women with compassion and respect. The fact that the Church has historically utterly failed in that respect does not negate the testimony of the gospels.

John 20: 11-16

      Mary stood crying outside the tomb. Still crying, she bent over and looked in the tomb, and saw two angels there, dressed in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, the other at the feet. "Woman, why are you crying?" they asked her.
     She answered, "They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have put him!"
     When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there; but she did not know that it was Jesus. "Woman, why are you crying?" Jesus asked her. "Who is it that you are looking for?"
     She thought he was the gardener, so she said to him, "If you took him away, sir, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him."
     Jesus said to her, "Mary!"
     She turned toward him and said in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" (This means "Teacher.")
     "Do not hold on to me," Jesus told her, "because I have not yet gone back up to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them for me, "'I go back up to him who is my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'"
     So Mary Magdalene went and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had told her this.

Actually, we have much bigger things to worry about than Sarah Palin. From the Times Online:

"In all, the Arctic ice shelves have lost an area more than three times the size of Manhattan Island this summer – 23 percent of their total mass - the researchers said. The loss is more than 10 times initial predictions, they added." The article goes on to explain that the conditions are such that the ice will not be able to reform. If this continues, and all indications point to that, we will all be in big trouble.

From Times Online

September 4, 2008

'She's like a moose going after a cabbage'

(AP)

Locals in Wasilla shouted and cheered as they watched Sarah Palin’s speech

....and from The Guardian

Republican National Convention

US election: Wasilla cheers its hometown heroine - Sarah Palin

Ed Pilkington in Wasilla, Alaska
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday September 04 2008 06:14 BST
Article history

Restaurant customers in Wasilla cheer the speech of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin to the 2008 Republican convention. Photograph: Al Grillo/AP

The instant you walked into the Mug-Shot Saloon, a hard-drinking straight-talking bar on the outskirts of town, there were a couple of clues as to the loyalties of its clientele. The first was a big sign up advertising the "Palin special" – an eight-inch sausage pizza doing a brisk trade at only $6.

The second clue was the fact that the packed crowd of more than 100 locals - a lavish turn out for a week night - was cheering the wooden roof off whenever the woman speaking on the enlarged flat-screen television made a point. It began the moment she said that she accepted the nomination as Republican vice-presidential candidate, which prompted hoots and cat whistles all around the bar.

It continued when Sarah Palin said that her nomination showed that every woman can walk through every door of opportunity, which had all of the many women in the saloon applauding. And it reached a peak when she cracked just about the only joke of her speech: what's the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.

A saloon bar crowd on the edge of Wasilla - the town where Palin grew up and where she was mayor in the late 1990s before going on to become Alaska's first female governor - is hardly representative of the American electorate. Everyone seemed to know her or at least to have met her.

But if the frequent shouts of "Go girl!" and "Yeah baby!" tell us anything, it is that Palin's direct and earthy delivery last night will speak volumes to the conservative heartland that until now has remained so uncertain about the candidacy of John McCain. As Leone Harris put it: "It's about time the vice-president had balls. And Sarah Palin has balls."

hadjie

Writing

curriculum

Cello!

August Haiku

High Summer

Mother Bears

Laundry and Storm Coming

Patty's Water Garden

June is busting out all over

Thalassa, thalassa mou, thalassi mou, thalassaki mou

badman report on home education

Correction

Border Stitches

Log Cabin Blanket

June Garden

Julia Spencer-Fleming

Ravelry

Easter

(no subject)

God save America.

'She's like a moose going after a cabbage'

US election: Wasilla cheers its hometown heroine - Sarah Palin

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